The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York is pleased to announce the upcoming poetry reading at Queens Library featuring Romanian-born New York-based writer Nina Cassian.

Free admission (in Romanian only).

Regarded as one of Romania's most prominent literary figures, Cassian has created a large and varied body of work, the main concern of which is passion: passion as desire and passion as suffering. Cassian's poems are marked especially by their physicality; they are intensely personal, rhythmically complex, and dynamic works that move easily from love to hate, from tenderness to severity.
Cassian was born to working class parents in Galati, a town at the mouth of the Danube. Cassian started playing piano, composing music, and writing poems at a very young age, and in high school she excelled in these arts—along with painting and foreign languages—to the detriment of her other studies. The rise of fascism in Romania, which forced her to leave her studies at the Pompilian Institute and attend a Jewish girls' school, led Cassian to embrace a staunch Communism.  As a visiting professor of creative writing at New York University in 1985, Cassian was awarded both a Yaddo Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship.  She currently lives and works in New York.

Cassian's first collection of poems, La scara 1/1 (1948; On the Scale of 1/1), was denounced by the Communist Party, which claimed the work did not follow properly the Party's principles. In subsequent collections, including Sufletul nostru (1949; Our Soul), An viu, noua sute si saptesprezece (1949; Vital Year, 1917), and Tinerete (1953; Youth), Cassian attempted to adhere to the Party doctrine she admired. In these works Cassain tried to use simpler vocabulary and avoid metaphorical language as the Communist government preferred. Cassian now rejects these works for aesthetic reasons. With the loosening of restrictions in the late 1950's, Cassian wrote a number of books in which the pleasures of the body are prevalent; these volumes include Singele (1966; Blood), Destinele paralele (1967; Parallel Destinies), Marea conjugare (1971; The Big Conjugation), and the award-winning Numaratoarea inversa (1983; Countdown). In 1982, Cassian was awarded the Bucharest Writers Association Award for De indurare (1981; Mercy). Call Yourself Alive? (1988) collects love poems from various periods of Cassian's literary career. In Cassain's later works, including the award-winning Life Sentence (1990) and Cheerleader for a Funeral (1992), the poet considers the theme of ageing along with her usual themes of passion, love, loss, and suffering.

Nina Cassian was featured in the following RCINY projects:
2008: TV series reaches Romanian audiences
Nina Cassian: Poetry and Exile
The Missing Arm of Venus: Contemporary Poetry in Translation
2010: Matching Words with Nina Cassian
Matching Words.2 with Nina Cassian